Innovation Adoption and Diffusion in the Digital Environment: Some Research Opportunities

Authors: Arvind Rangaswamy, Sunil Gupta

The rapid growth of the Internet raises important new research questions about how individuals decide whether and when to adopt an innovation, and how the innovation diffuses through the population. The digital medium will influence not only what research issues we should pursue, but also how we will explore those issues, and how we disseminate research results, insights, and techniques to a broad audience. In this paper, we take the first steps towards investigating these questions. We start by highlighting how the digital medium is influencing adoption and diffusion patterns of both digital and non-digital products. We then highlight several research opportunities made possible by the richer data that are becoming available online. Specifically, we focus on opportunities for developing and testing finer-grained models of innovation adoption and diffusion.